The Mythos meeting focused on the wrong AI risk to banks. Here’s the one nobody is talking about

When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell convened the chief executives of leading U.S. banks earlier this month to discuss Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, they signaled a shift in how artificial intelligence is being understood in finance. This was not a meeting about innovation but a warning: that models capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities could pose a material risk to core financial infrastructure. That concern is justified. But the focus remains too narrow. In recent years, in discussions with leading financial institutions, I have seen how quickly concern rises once the adversarial uses of AI are understood. Yet the translation into action remains slow and uneven. Much of the current attention is focused on cyber risk. This is a serious threat. But it is not the only one and not the most immediate. Alongside the risks highlighted by Mythos, a parallel threat is already unfolding at scale. It does not depend on new frontier models, but on AI capabilities that are already widely available. And unlike cyber attacks, which require access to systems, this threat operates by targeting people. What Has Changed Is Not Just Sophistication — It’s Economics Artificial intelligence has made fraud dramatically cheaper, easier to execute , and far more scalable. What once required time and coordination can now be automated and deployed at industrial scale. AI systems can generate thousands of convincing messages, voices and videos in seconds, each tailored to a specific individual. This is not incremental. It is structural. Fraud has shifted from a manual activity to a machine-driven one. Hyper-personalised social engineering campaigns, often powered by AI agents, now operate across multiple channels, jurisdictions , and identities. They impersonate executives, advisers , or family members with increasing credibility, creating urgency and inducing authorised transfers. In these scenarios, the system is not breached. It is…